Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/283

 8. STUBBS: THE CANON LAW 269 gether in the hands of ebcfesiasfeicat'4awye«s> may be for the moment looked at together; and the first aspect which our subject then takes is the attitude of the system towards theology on the one side and to the national, or, as lawyers would perhaps call it, municipal law on the other. From the Conquest to the Reformation canon law, proceeding by civil- ian method and being able to call on the municipal executive to put its sentences in force, is a strong link between theology and national discipline; but a link with so much intricate workmanship employed upon it as to be offensive in many ways both to theology and to the common law. The theolo- gian saw the great commandments of God, and the statutes of the Church, and the voice of conscience, lowered by being made dependent for their cogency on an elaborate system of human invention which fettered freedom of action, and in some respects freedom of thought also ; which reduced moral obligations to a system of penances, pecuniary com- mutations, monitions, and excommunications, and which made use of the sacraments of the Church as the mere means and appliances of a coercion to external good behaviour, which ought to be a free-will offering and the instinctive product of a sincere heart. Do not think that I am exaggerating the attitude of repulsion in which the pure theologian and the pure moralist stood to the ecclesiastical lawyer who was making money out of the practice of the Courts Christian. You remember how John of Salisbury had doubted whether an archdeacon could be saved: Roger Bacon declares that the study of the civil law, attracting the clever men among the clergy, threw the study of theology into a second place, and secularised the clerical character, making the priest as much a layman as the common lawyer; while Richard of Bury, the author of the Philobiblion, and Holcot the ^reat scholastic, declared, the one that the civilian, although he gained the friendship of the world, was an enemy of God; the other, that under existing relations the handmaid Hagar, despising the true wife, was in apt analogy to the contempt imder which neglected theology sank in the estimation of the world as compared with the law. It is true that these remarks have a primary reference to the civil law, but, as